Buying an issue of Cosmopolitan is always slightly embarrassing for me. Gingerly flipping through one in the sanctity of a nail salon is fine, but there is usually a vodka martini between that and actually standing in line — around people — and purchasing one. A Cosmo, I decided, was something of a how-to guide for becoming the brassy, prurient protagonist from an ’80s Jackie Collins novel. So if in 2012, the August cover screaming “When Your Vagina Acts Weird After Sex” still has the power to be a literary scarlet letter, one has to wonder what women must have felt like toting it in 1967.

Apparently, they couldn’t get enough.

Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmo from 1965 to 1997 who died on Monday at age 90, was a Carrie Bradshaw for the ’60s. Brown’s 1962 novel Sex and the Single Girl predated Sex and the City by almost 40 years. The book, part Holly Golightly call-girl glamour, part Beyonce’s Single Ladies feminist anthem, encouraged sexual liberation and financial freedom for unmarried women. It sold two million copies in three weeks and made the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Time magazine’s bestseller lists. In it, Brown explains how women can tap into their ‘sexth sense’ — a Cosmo phrase if ever there was one. Far from the author gaining tawdry notoriety, women bombarded Brown with fan mail, begging for advice on sex, relationships and beauty.

Interestingly, it was her husband David Brown, a magazine editor who would later become the producer of hit films such as The Sting,Jaws, Cocoon and Chocolat, who gave his wife the idea for the book. He found a series of love letters Helen Gurley had written to a married lover earlier in life, and suggested she write a guide for single girls having an affair. Sex and the Single Girl has been translated into at least 16 languages since it was published in 1962. Warner Brothers bought the movie rights for $200,000 and made it into a 1964 movie with Natalie Wood as Brown and Tony Curtis as an ethically flexible magazine editor looking for a cheap way to boost circulation.

Unapologetically trashy, Cosmo is relevant because it has perpetuated, since its 1967 rebranding under Brown as a magazine just for women, the notion that career women can be both glamorous and sexually fulfilled. The wildly successful HBO drama Sex and the City is often called a direct homage to Brown’s novel, but where Bradshaw’s life — which fell apart every time she ended a relationship with a lover — was more of a blow to feminism, Brown strove to show women that men should complement their lives rather than take it over. She used only beautiful and glamorous models on the front. “A million times a year I defend my covers,” Brown said. “I like skin, I like pretty. I don’t want to photograph the girl next door.”

This may well be because Brown was the girl next door once, born to a family of modest means, in an existence she deemed mediocre in every way. “I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me — ordinary, hillbilly and poor, and I repudiated it from the time I was seven years old,” Brown wrote. She dropped out of college due to a lack of funds and moved to Los Angeles, where she briefly worked as an escort until she discovered, on the job, what it is that escorts are actually expected to do. Then she discovered, through a series of secretarial jobs, the power of sex at the office. There was money, she found, in allowing the occasional fondle by a boss, a fur coat in the occasional dalliance. When she took over at Cosmopolitan, her main message to women was to use their sexuality to improve their own lives. In a Vanity Fair Proust questionnaire, Brown revealed the person she most admired was Cleopatra, because “she was a good boss and had a good love life.”

A tiny figure, at 5’4” and 100 pounds throughout her life, Brown got breast implants at 73 and wore big jewellery, fishnet tights and mini-dresses until she was well over 80. She was often seen at the most exclusive New York society events, and was named a ‘living landmark’ in 1995. “I was mousy on the outside, but inside I’m this tiger and I have to get on with it,” she said. Well, she got on with it. When Brown took over at Cosmo in 1965, circulation figures were at 800,000. In the 80s, she had them up to 3,000,000.

Cosmopolitan, which gave rise to spinoffs such as Glamour and Marie Claire, loses a bit of its subversive edge in the age of sexually explicit TV such as Girls and Game of Thrones, but far from being just blissful fluff, it began a sexual revolution which lasted decades, empowering women with the message that they could have it all — without being married.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to unabashedly carry a Cosmo around even now, but I’m happy it exists. Where else could I learn how to “Turn Him On From Across The Room,” (August 2012) or much more importantly “What Your Va-Jay-Jay Is Trying to Tell You” (Sept. 2011)? Maybe it’s that, as Brown famously declared, good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.

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